


Why Reyes Can't Have Nice Things

by DeathByBobaTea



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Genji teaches fareeha how to say fuck, My First Fanfic, Pre-Recall, and ana reyes and jack are just friends raising their kids together and taking names idk, its my first time please be gentle, reyes hates mccrees fashion choices at every opertunity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 01:00:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14533266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathByBobaTea/pseuds/DeathByBobaTea
Summary: McCree is bad at making friends.Or, maybe, good at it, if you're generous enough to overlook the broken bones? Either way, he earned a new nickname doing it and Reyes has to figure out why the fuck no one thought to tell him that two of his agents got into a fight.Genji teaches Fareeha how to say fuck in three new languages and McCree, the good big brother that he is, doesn't stop him.





	1. Dragon Tamer? In My Cowboy?

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to Erin and Emily for dealing with my bullshit. And to that guy at the boba shop who kept talking about fucking the Predator really loudly. That guy really knows how to live.

Ana, to the extreme chagrin of the black ops commander, always knew the best gossip before he did. She wasn’t even Blackwatch, for fuck’s sake, and not even any covert ops training! Just that damn maternal, disarming smile and an omnipotent eye.

Jack had laughed when Reyes grumbled about it to him, leaning back in his chair away from the reports spread out over the holopads on his desk and fixing him in that shit-eating grin of his that the press would never know the revered Strike Commander could muster, “Careful Gabe, or she’ll get promoted into your job next.”

  
Reyes just snorts at the old jab that lost its sting years ago, “Christ, I’d let her have it too. Let her try to control the damn vaquero, see how fast she retires.”

  
Or doesn’t. McCree was always at his most polite around her, had been from the moment he’d seen her nail a target nearly 4,000 miles away and he’d applauded her with a low whistle, trying not to sound too impressed. If anyone could get the kid to get over his resistance to authority, it would probably be Ana Amari. Better her than him, either way.

  
Reyes makes a private note to pair them up the first joint Overwatch/Blackwatch op that presents itself.

  
“Has he done something new?” Jack’s voice tinted in that Not-Mad-Or-Even-Surprised-Just-Disappointed tone that he’d developed over these long years of indirect parenthood; Ana had little Fareeha and Gabe, more or less, had McCree which meant that Jack had been dragged into parenthood too. Their vows to watch each others’ backs had been made with waves of machines intent on destroying humanity in mind but, well, Omnics, kids, not that much of a difference in the end.

  
“Not done anything.” Reyes grits his teeth, thoughts coming back to the reason he was complaining in the first place, “Not exactly.”

  
“The dragon-tamer shit? Did Ana have to tell you about that? That why you came to me to complain?”

  
Reyes fixes his oldest friend with his most intimidating Blackwatch Commander™ stare he can manage, the one that makes even his most veteran operatives power walk not so subtly away to get clear of the yelling.

  
It just makes Jack roll his eyes, “You didn’t know about McCree and the Shimada hier?”

  
“No.” He snaps back defensively, not sheathing his sharp glare just yet, “I thought Shimada still wasn’t talking. You know, the gossip in this base is fucked, if the dragon tamer shit gets passed around but not the fact that the Cowboy got his shit pushed in to earn it.”

  
It had taken asking Ana how Jesse McCree, in all his tacky cowboy get up glory, had earned a nickname not associated with his defining aesthetic to hear about the fight. He was cocooned in reports about the Milan mission and the thinly veiled threats from the UN to give up data on Blackwatch operations in East Asia for two days (“Just two days! 48 hours!”) and when he immersed, by some miracle, McCree had become the only person Shimada Genji would talk to, earning himself the stupid nickname dragon tamer (“This is why we can’t have anything nice!” He’d moaned to Ana).

  
“Well, you’re not gonna stop him from talking to him, are you Gabe?” The grin slipped off Jack’s face to be replaced by something more like concern, “You know what Angela said about the Shimada kid.”

 

_And you are planning to just give him back his weapons and expect that to go well?! That man in there is clinging to life out of spite and a sense of vengeance, Commanders, but do not expect that to last; sooner or later it won’t be enough and it’ll be on your heads if he hurts himself in that moment! Mein Gott, I hope you both have fun explaining to the accounting department how you lost your most expensive asset to suicide!_

 

When the cyborg was released and spent seventeen hours in the simulation room, only prevented from going longer when he collapsed from exhaustion, and then stopped speaking to anyone, it was like a prophecy fulfilled.

  
“Course I wouldn’t.” Reyes answers, glare dying, “But you’re saying you’re not worried Jesse made a friend by letting him break an arm, two ribs, and fracture a third?”

  
Jack just shrugs, the bastard, “Eh, Ana dislocated my shoulder our third meeting. I’m not too concerned about it. Don’t be so overprotective, Gabriel.”

  
Nevermind she dislocated it pushing him out of the way of a bullet, not knowing that the corn loving fuck had a shit sense of balance that not even SEP could fix and had been standing on the precipice of a tiny 30 foot drop.

  
Whatever, he’d just lecture Jesse about it when he got back from the scouting mission. Why the hell had he not told Reyes about it sooner anyways? Though he wasn’t surprised Angela hadn’t reported his operative’s injuries to him if Shimada had been responsible for them. Christ, he’d have to swing by the medbay and make sure the good doctor understood the importance of those reports.


	2. Ch. 2

“Look, Commander,” Isuel flicks a strand on long back hair over her shoulder petulantly, like a child spitefully admitting to breaking a rule willing to argue their case, “That cyborg guy’s a pretty scary looking mess, sir. No one was gonna complain that McCree took it upon himself to deal with him for us.”

  
A few eager nods from the agents half cowering behind her confirm it. Everyone knew better than to fuck with the Commander’s best operative, no matter how stupid he looked. At least not seriously, anyways, Reyes had stolen McCree’s dumb spurs to fuck with him more time than anyone else.

  
Reyes crosses his arms over his chest and narrows his eyes at the 4”11’ woman standing confidently in front of him, not satisfied until they were all shaking, “Deal with him?”

  
Isuel looks back unwavering as she replies, “It’s not exactly easy to coordinate with a person who refuses to use the comm system, sir. McCree volunteered to stick close to him in simms, make sure he didn’t charge into a fight and leave us scrambling to cover him.”

  
It did explain why Shimada’s training simm scores had improved so dramatically in such a short period.

  
“We couldn’t’ve known he’d snap.” Min quips over her twin’s left shoulder, “And he’s talking now, isn’t he? McCree’s gotten hurt for less, right?”

  
“That-” was undeniably true, despite Reyes’ best efforts, “-wasn’t my question, Agent. I asked why no one reported a fight between two of our agents that resulted in one of them spending the night in Medbay.”

  
Jones fields the question when Isuel’s silence draws out for just a moment past comfortable, “Figured Mercy would do the honor for us, sir, or that McCree would tell you himself. Out of curiosity, why aren’t you addressing these questions to Shimada himself, sir.”

  
The former con artist turned espionage specialist doesn’t look up from his hand of cards that hasn’t changed since Reyes stormed into the Blackwatch common room. Reyes hopes Jones can feel the power of his glare focused on the back of his neck even if he doesn’t let it show.

  
“Because it would look very bad if the commander of the Blackwatch division was caught breaking into the Medbay to lecture a patient about basic safety rules.”

  
“She banned you from the research wing too? Join the club.” Min huffs, “You steal one classified document and you never hear the end of it.”

  
“An incident that I am still apologizing for.” Reyes growls pointedly back.

  
“Is Shimada back in Medbay?” Torres perks up from the other side of the poker table, “Again? Wasn’t he just cleared?”

  
“Assume he’s always there, you’ll be right ninety nine percent of the time.” Jones quips, shuffling his hand of assorted and unrelated cards as if there’s a pattern to organize it by, “Even if he isn’t hurt, Mercy’s got a little academic hard on at the - how’d she phrase it?- unprecedented level of integration of prosthetics into the human nervous system.”

  
Fucking hypocrite, telling Jack and him to be worried about his mental health when she was acting like he was a dissected frog to be picked and prodded at. Though, still, she may not have been wrong; seventeen hours was a long time.

  
“Just tell me the next time one of you beats the shit out of someone, alright?” Reyes sighs roughly, “Is that so much to ask for?”

  
“Speaking of hard ons, Commander-” God, he should never have let Isuel talk him into hiring her twin, no firing range scores, no matter how excellent, could be worth whatever came next! “-You think you could lift the betting rule for just one more pool? Cause I’m 500 euros certain that Mercy gave Shimada a super robo-cock with rave lights and- oh!”

  
Min, demonstrating what’s left of her pitifully lacking self-preservation instinct, quickly sprints out of the room like her life depends on it just as Reyes steps past her twin to give chase.


	3. Chapter 3

Angela, he decides halfway through a mountain of reports that had built up over the course of the morning, wasn’t worth going in person to straighten out. A professionally worded but biting memo would have to do instead. Secretly, maybe, though he’d never admit to it, Reyes was relieved; ever since SEP the smell of antiseptic and the feeling of stiffly starched hospital sheets made his skin crawl and his bones tense, ready for an Bastion unit or a scientist with a loaded syringe to pop out of hiding and advance. Both options were equally terrible.

  
The good old days, Jack would say with that familiar bitterness in his eyes.

  
Then a spir-jangling kick is delivered to his office door and a 20 year old _adult, supposedly_ cowboy, complete with BAMF belt buckle he swears he’ll make Jack regret giving him one day, and unlit cigar sticking out of his cocky grin, plops into the chair in front of his desk.  
“Howdy, Gabi! Hope ya’ll didn’t miss me too much while I was gone!”

  
Hm, broach the subject now? Or let him get comfortable in his secret first? Hm, choices...

  
“You send your report in?” Reyes asks dryly, setting aside a holopad with a blueprint for some new turret design Torbjorn wants approval to build. Or at least get official permission to build so he didn’t have to hot glue together scraps to work on it. God knows the engineering department was enough for a mess already without adding undoubtedly souped up and potentially explosive hot glue guns to the mix. No one needed a repeat of the microwave incident.

  
“Yeah boss, just before I came here.” McCree glances at the blueprint, his leg bouncing beneath the desk with unused energy, “No complications to the mission itself, but the next team you send in is gonna have a hell of a time with their anti-air gun. That Overwatch pilot, Oxton, was it? They say she’s mighty good, maybe Morrison'll loan her out to us.”

  
Reyes pulls another holopad close and flips through it until he finds McCree’s report, quickly tapping it open, entering an access code, and reviewing the building plans enclosed in it. Thirteen red stars outlined the border of the Talon fortress, marking the positions of the guns.  
“Kind of overkill, right?” McCree’s leg stills as he leans forward to look over the map with him, “That many? When all they’re got in there is a weapons cash?”

  
“Hm.” Reyes agrees, “And they’re all functional?”

  
“Well, now, I wasn’t about to go and test them and see but they’re all manned. At least two soldiers on each and twenty or so patrolling the perimeter between them. SMGs, handguns, saw a real small bowie knife on one guy. Does that count as anti-compensation, d'ya think?”

  
Comfortable enough then.

  
Reyes hums out another neutral note and leans away from the holopad, “And you and Khatri weren’t detected? No injuries?”

  
“No, sir!” McCree does his best to look affronted behind that grin, “What do you think we are, new recruits?”

  
Another neutral note, “I dunno, vanqero, only green recruits don’t report injuries to their commanding officers.”

  
McCree’s self satisfied grin dims just long enough to count as not imagined before he goes back to jiggling his leg and reaching up to flick his cowboy hat lower over his eyes, “Dunno what you mean, I just told you no one was hurt.”

  
“No? Hm. ‘Cause a green recruit could maybe make that mistake. But even a recruit wouldn’t keep an injury they sustained before going on a dangerous mission from their commanding officer. Only a real fucking idiot would do that. Solo un idiota haría eso, verdad?”

  
He switches to Spanish just to make McCree curl that extra inch lower in his seat, the brim of his hat now entirely obscuring him face.

  
“Weren’t that dangerous, boss.” He murmurs around his cigar, “And anyways Miss Angela fixed me up before we left. Would you really have kept me back if you’d’a known?”

  
“No. But point is, I should have been told.” And he continues on before McCree can try to protest, “I shouldn’t have had to hear about this from a non medical, non Blackwatch agent.”

  
He looks like he swallowed something sour and teeths harder at the cigar to get the taste out, “Yeah, okay, fine. It was only a arm, you know? Healed in less than an hour.”

  
“And three ribs.” Reyes cocks an unamused eyebrow at him, “Those protect your lungs, you know. Dunno if you know this from the way you suck those death sticks down, but you need those things to live.”

  
A huge exaggerated eye roll later and the cowboy’s on his feet, “This is what I get for doing something nice! I came in here to save you the trouble of reading the whole damn thing and from whatever paperwork you got, but no! Guess I’m better off avoiding you like the damn plague, if this is what I get!”

  
“Don’t hide shit from me and I’ll be a whole lot more pleasant.” Reyes has the supreme pleasure of knowing he’s right.

  
McCree is halfway out to door but he has one more point to make.

  
“Who’re you going to annoy next, kid?”

  
His turn back towards him is noticeably slower than it has to be but by the time he’s facing him, his chin’s jutted up stubbornly, making sure none of his face is hidden when he replies cooly, “Miss Angela. Figured I’d thank her for doing such a great job taking care of my arm.”

  
“Yeah? Okay. Just remember how well the last time you tried to make friends with people who’d sell you out for a fucking corn chip went, mijo.”

  
The cowboys left arm twitches, the deadlock brand emblazoned on it visible even through the fabric of his flannel.

  
“You telling me not to reach out to the guy, Gabe?”

  
“No. Just want you to be careful, don’t wanna see worse than your arm get fucked up, okay?”


	4. Fuck

The next person Genji (“Genji, not Shimada, he fucking hates that.”) managed to have an actual full conversation with that wasn’t just Yeses and Nos was little Fareeha Amari.

  
“You got shit taste. Popplio’s garbage.” Was how it started. How it ended was Ana giving both her children a lecture on how Fareeha wasn’t allowed to swear and don’t you dare deny it, Jesse Joel McCree, you taught her those words, where else would she learn the Spanish way to say that and don’t say Gabriel, that’s the most unconvincing thing she’s ever heard!

  
“Your full name is Joel?” the synthetic tinted voice asks quietly when she’s finished.

  
Ana sighs like she’s dying, “And Genji, don’t insult my daughter’s pokemon. She may not know how to fire a gun yet but everyone in her family does.”

  
Before McCree can dig into the fact that she may have just given him permission to shoot Genji, only just released from Miss Angela’s tender care some scant few hours ago, if he insults a video game character, Ana’s comm chirps brightly from its position on her collar. Another long suffering sigh, a kiss to Fareeha and Jesse’s foreheads, and a stern look at Genji, and she’s gone.

  
Her mother is barely out of earshot before Fareeha rounds on Genji, eyes still burning with the intensity of their fight, “I already know how to shoot, Jesse taught me with Peacemaker so I could shoot you myself if I felt like it.”

  
“Do you feel like it?”

  
She’s a twig of a thing, thin arms with bones poking at the joints like they’re trying to sprout free but she has her mother’s eyes. Her calculating, dangerous, precise eyes narrowed like a laser sight on Genji.

  
“What if I taught you how to say fuck in all the languages I know so your mother cannot catch you?”

  
“Deal!”

  
Jesse feels a terrible urge to be the responsible one and stop this from happening but then he shivers, wondering if that’s how Gabe felt all the goddamn time, and instead turns his attention to memorizing the syllables Genji breaks apart for them to stutter on. Who knows when he’ll have to call someone a bastard in Japanese? Not Jesse, but it’s better to always be prepared for anything, that’s what Gabe always says anyways.

  
“Kuso...Kutabare…” She’s starting to emphasize the syllables a little more fluently, “How many languages do you speak?”

  
“Four, mostly.” He answers neutrally which makes Jesse jerk his head up to stare at him; this is more personal information that he’d ever gotten out of him.

  
“Mostly?” Fareeha presses, enacting her critical eye again. If Ana’s eyes were all-seeing, her daughter’s particular shade of brown were made for getting people to spill truths.

  
“I know the important words and how to phrase them.” Genji explains.

  
“Like how to insult someone in all of them.” Jesse huffs out, letting his initial shock slip off in favour of enjoying the moment.

  
On Genji’s worst days, he communicated in glares, threats, and scrambling up a goddamn vertical wall to escape his company which all hurt but really weren’t that bad, considering how Jesse was prepared to deal with more broken bones.

  
Good days were conversations, usually superficial or based on Jesse’s constant chatter, but sometimes Genji would initiate something himself, even if it was just conveying what time he was scheduled on the simm floor, the implication being that Jesse was welcome to join. But rarely anything even slightly personal, nothing that alluded to anything before Blackwatch. 

  
But, today, apparently, was an absolutely wonderful, vibrant, outlier of a day.

  
“It’s good to know if someone is insulting you behind your back.” Genji is saying.

  
“Why can’t you just use the universal translators for that?” Fareeha asks, tucking her forgotten Nintendo away in her backpack, “So you’d always know exactly what someone was saying? Overwatch uses them.”

  
“My family-” Jesse’d never say he has as sharp an eye as Ana’s but his are sharp enough to recognize that glazed cloud accumulating behind the red of his friend’s irises, “-believe that it is more...uh, genuine, if you can negotiate in a shared language.”

  
“Do you know Arabic?” Jesse asks, ready to lead this conversation into safer waters, “Fara, you oughta teach him to say fuck in Arabic, return the favour, you know. Be neighborly.”

  
She grins and complies and no one touches sensitive subjects for the rest of the lesson. Genji rarely talks this much and he’s gonna savour every goddamn word he can get.


End file.
